Summary of Study

Today many humanitarian and human rights organisations project their ethical ideals through colonial models of development and protection. A more critical strand of human rights discourse responds to acknowledged global injustices with minimal demands that are simply not enough to challenge capitalism and coloniality. In light of this context, Choose Your Bearing has argued that if theorists of rights discourse are to take decolonial concerns seriously, we will both recognise the nation state as a generally predatory entity (against minorities and immigrants) and move from a model of minimal advocacy for the downtrodden to a model of maximal activism. In this way, we would make demands on the institutions and actors that keep a majority of people across the world down in the first place. Conversely, this book has also suggested that decolonial theory should reconsider its critique of human rights. The primary and secondary duties that third-generation (solidarity) rights claims entail provide a way for people to connect to decolonial work through the terms that are already the most important to them. More specifically, the duties of Glissant's right to opacity fall on elite actors in the West. Standing with others is a primary duty that supports the right to opacity in an age of colonial resource extraction and blatant violations of land rights across the planet. Enacting the secondary duties around the right to opacity could look like attending to what we purchase or boycott, where we live, to what we belong, whom we consider kin, and what risks we are willing to take in our personal and professional lives. As opposed to the position- and career-maintaining efforts of professional reforms, this is ethical work found in much more banal, much less prestigious disengagements from professional spaces as they are. But this is not a withdrawal in the sense of denying the world. Like a boycott, this is an action verified by a community, and this community can be organised by rights claims made in different parts of the world. Its collective actions aim to uphold political, economic and cultural rights internationally. In this way, the local mode of engagement that lives out the primary and secondary duties of a right to opacity embodies a provincial bearing that does not become a provincialism, but that instead participates in a radical internationalism (DA 438/CD 146).